Tag: home

After a convolutedly wonderful, if unfinished and rather exhausting, walk from one corner of Dartmoor to the other, and quite a number of weeks spent immersed in an amazing garden, in grounding myself and finding a path forward, we found out that the straight way between Leewood and High Heathercombe is actually quite beautiful and much easier. Especially since a bus runs from Yelverton–a mere half hour walk away–to Postbridge, shortening the way to roughly half. That still leaves around three hours of walking through moors and forests. The overall trip only takes about half a day, so it has already happened twice in a bit more than a fortnight.

My choice of lifestyle is often associated with freedom. I can supposedly freely move around, have no ties to any particular place, no long-term commitments, no debts, no attachments… Although nothing of the above is entirely true or entirely false, one thing is certain: a homeless person gets to think and talk about freedom a lot.

A couple of months ago a dear friend wrote in a letter about all the material possesions I had shed—many of which he kindly took the challenge of further distributing. He wrote that “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose“, promptly asking himself whether that is actually true. In a sense, that may be the only real freedom, at least the way we define it in our culture. And thus we probably only achieve it seconds before we die. Because, don’t we, until then, always have at least something left to lose? Read more

In my view, most long journeys we take—maybe also the short ones?—are but a journey towards ourselves. Something is missing, there is a hunger, a wanderlust, something needs to change in order for our selves to be acknowledged. I guess the evident thing, at least nowadays, is to go someplace, “change the tapestry”, look around—outside ourselves—for whatever is missing.

As many philosophers, thinkers, wise people or whatever, already have said: what is missing is inside ourselves. Simply going somewhere is not going to fill the gap or still the hunger. It requires introspection, literally to look inwards, to “journey towards our inside”.Read more